[wishlist] What would you like to see in OpenSesame?

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As you know, this is not a professional support forum: People who commonly answer these questions don't get paid for it (except in appreciation and karma of course ), so many only do this if they have some spare time, outside of their regular activities. Therefore, it is safe to assume that no one is working on your question, until you do get an answer. So if you are experiencing time pressure, definitely don't place all your bets on the forum for being helped in time. Our hope is that eventually the whole forum community will pick up the effort to help each other and not only rely on the commonly helping forum members to find answers. That would spread the weight over many shoulders, and probably also speed up response times.

That being said, there used to be and option to simply place __ITA__ in the message box, which displayed a message "Intent to answer", but that doesn't work anymore by the looks of it (or i remember the command wrongly).

Is there something you may implement in Open Sesame to deactivate the Windows key while it is running? I know there is a way to deactivate it this key manually on the computer. But it would be so much nicer if it just does not work when i run Open Sesame. Alt+F4 does not work neither.

Trial number (optional, after subject number. If a subject has multiple trials the results overwrite when not replaced.

Online embedding possibilities or a virtual environment to play opensesame files in

more solid linux install package? I had 20 colleagues download the program, and had to help everyone with linux because of missing psycho package, missing icons, missing OpenGL etc. Maybe you can embed them in the install or not depend on them? Didn't have a single problem with windows 8, 10 or Mac though

Trial number wouldn't hurt (although it is easy to implement with an inline script).

Sane linux (not only ubuntu) installer is desirable, but I am not sure if it's possible.

My biggest issue is that form items do not have built in solution that prevents participants from advancing when they do not provide input (e.g. type text, check a checkbox item). Given that most participants want to just rush through the experiment asap, so this feature is a must. Currently, I have an inline script per each form that checks for provided input, but it doesn't work for rating scales through form_base.

Ability to log or save data wile you go. Currently, if you have 10-15 forms, you need to go through all of them to get a logger item to save data. If the program crashes, no data will be saved. Current solutions are either to put a log after each item, which is tedious and the log file looks messy, or to resort to python scripting, which is tedious as well.

Accurate audio stimuli presentation for a priming experiment where one wants to collect reaction times in milliseconds. From my reading of the forum, it appears that there are some limitations having to do with the back-ends.

Sorting, or rather not sorting the log file (this was mentioned before, I think). It is annoying that all variables are sorted alphabetically. I want my specified order.
Solution to this issue is to uncomment line 54 in logger.py file which says self._logvars.sort()

In E-Prime, if you want to skip a section of the experiment, there is a flag object that you can drop into the experiment to mark a spot, and then you can use inline scripting to skip to that place in the experiment. It's very handy for programming in a way to start later in the experiment after a crash, or for testing parts of an experiment. Is there already something like that in OpenSesame? Thanks!

In E-Prime, if you want to skip a section of the experiment, there is a flag object that you can drop into the experiment to mark a spot, and then you can use inline scripting to skip to that place in the experiment.

That would indeed be convenient, and I've considered it before. The main reason that this doesn't exist yet is that items often depend on what happened before. For example, say that you skip directly to a feedback item, then this item would crash if no responses were collected before to give feedback on.

Does E-Prime have a particular way to deal with such situations?

For now, you can accomplish more-or-less the same thing by setting the run-if statements of items that you want to skip to 'never'.

I think a section on Python code in the "Categories" on the left would be nice. That way you can filter for the type of input you're using instead of getting both Python and OpenSesame in the search results. I know OpenSesame uses Python but the Inline Script coding is done a little differently.

I am under the impression that Open Sesame runs python in the background. I other words, it would be conventiant if there were a way to get the following code from the script above, so I can use it as a starting point for an inline script.

It would be cool to add an option of adding a logo to the backend. Currently, we have to add a logo to each page if we want the logo to show. It is only one line of code but you have to add it to every form and sketchpad. If you are only using these, then having one place (backend option) where the logo could be added would make it easier.

Making it easier to access the wishlist from "My Discussions" would be useful as well. I had to do a search to find the wishlist and it would be nice to have it in the sidebar menu of "My Discussions" so then I can post wishes here instead.

Please add an auto-save feature. Especially when you are working on it and then test run it, it would be nice if it saved automatically at that point because, if it crashes, you will have lost all the changes you made.

It would be nice to test the code in inline scripts by marking it, so that it runs only the selected part. Just the way it is already working for the output, but showing the stimuli like in the quick show. I imagine something that loads everything from the prepare phases in the whole experiment, but runs only the selected part in the run phase. This would make it much easier to test only some parts of the experiment, without changing the code (especially if you script the whole experiment like me).

Having center=True (as for canvas.text) would be nice for rectangles too (canvas.rect).

Is there something to delete text from a canvas?
Sometimes you want to show the same stimulus various times (in a loop), but tell the participants the trial number. I used canvas.text for this. However, it overwrites the number in each trial (e.g. writing a 2 over the 1), which is of course not readable. I made several workaround, but none really satisfies me.
1. Overwrite the black text by white text at the end of the trial (does not really work, you still see some rests)
2. Put a white rectangle on the text position at the end of the trial (at the moment you have to set center=False for the text and find the center position yourself, then you can use the x/y coordinates for the rectangle)
3. Make a copy of the canvas in each trial. Overwrite the copy only. Use the copy. Best option at the moment.

This would just be a small thing and maybe it exists already somewhere hidden: a way to get rid off the message "Variable xy is unknown. Placeholder color is used" (roughly translated from german). Especially when there are a lot of variables, it can get quite annoying, especially if you want to get to the script of a canvas. Sometimes the last one doesn't go away at all (at least using Ubuntu). That means I have to close the experiment, open it again and hope the message doesn't block the button where I can choose where I want to work (e.g., script).

Other than that: it's just awesome! More and more people around me are starting using and to loving OpenSesame too!

This would just be a small thing and maybe it exists already somewhere hidden: a way to get rid off the message "Variable xy is unknown. Placeholder color is used" (roughly translated from german). Especially when there are a lot of variables, it can get quite annoying, especially if you want to get to the script of a canvas. Sometimes the last one doesn't go away at all (at least using Ubuntu). That means I have to close the experiment, open it again and hope the message doesn't block the button where I can choose where I want to work (e.g., script).

With the latest version (3.2.5), these notifications should disappear automatically when you hover over them. Is that not the case for you?

Thank you for your reply! In the majority of cases, these notifications do indeed go away, however, that is not always the case. If I hover over them quickly (to be able to get to the script view), it often happens that one or two notifications stay there and I'm unable to remove them. This also happened to a colleague using macOS.

If I hover over them quickly (to be able to get to the script view), it often happens that one or two notifications stay there and I'm unable to remove them. This also happened to a colleague using macOS.

Thanks for pointing this out. There was indeed a bug that could cause notifications to get stuck. It will be fixed in the next maintenance release!

Have you thought about the possibilty of integrating a facility to use Opensesame in a VR environment or is this beyond the capabilities of the its code structure?
Eyetrackers are now being bought by the big guns and built into their headsets so the next generation of Stimulus presentations are going to move towards 3D viewing.

Have you thought about the possibilty of integrating a facility to use Opensesame in a VR environment or is this beyond the capabilities of the its code structure?

I have thought about it, and it should be possible, at least to some extent. It would require writing a new backend that works with a VR device. And to make it actually useful, the drawing operations should support a z coordinate, which would then be ignored by the regular backends.

However, while it's technically possible, I don't have any concrete plans in that direction!